Echoing through the West this weekend are plaintive howls -- not of the long-elusive Bigfoot, but rather of his most faithful followers.

Once more, true believers in the storied beast find themselves absorbing another bit of heresy, a fresh claim that the man-beast is merely the stuff of campfire chatter.

Relatives of Ray L. Wallace, a logger who propelled one of California's earliest publicized claims of the creature's existence, have stepped forward in the shadow of his passing to say their patriarch admitted to trickery that fueled one of American culture's most enduring myths.

They say it was Wallace who stoked a fury in 1958 by slipping into two, carved, 16-inch-long wooden feet, then stomping around his Humboldt County site logging camp as a gag on fellow workmen.

Ray Wallace died on Nov. 26 of heart failure at 84.

"Ray L. Wallace was Bigfoot," his son Michael told the Seattle Times in a story published Thursday, a claim few sons can make beyond metaphor. "The reality is, Bigfoot just died."

And he said 1967's famous "Patterson-Gimlin Film" -- a grainy home movie that allegedly captures a startled specimen fleeing a streambed -- may be only his obliging mother wearing a monkey suit.

The elder Wallace had told the film's shooters where they could spot the Sasquatch, said Ray Crowe, founder of the International Bigfoot Society in Hillsborough, Ore.

Reports of Bigfoot -- also known as Sasquatch, Yeti, Yayoo and Skunk Ape -- are a folklore constant, fed by the occasional camper or rural dweller who steps from the wilds to describe a startling encounter with a musky, hair- covered biped.

The Wallace family's assertion is potent not only for its pop-culture punch but because plaster casts of Bigfoot's purported footprints originate from such sightings. Taken together, the discrediting of both the Wallace and Patterson-Gimlin tales would poke a significant hole in Bigfoot lore.

But no ground was given Friday among the West's loosely knit, largely dissonant camp of Bigfoot backers.

"We all knew (Wallace) was hoaxing years ago," said Henner Fahrenbach, a retired Oregon Regional Primate Research Center scientist who has published a numerical analysis of Sasquatch spottings. Contrasted with the bevy of varied real-life wilderness tales that percolate weekly on Web sites, Fahrenbach said,

the debunking of Wallace's tale "fades into insignificance."

Plaster casts formed at the Six Rivers National Forest location where Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin purportedly filmed the creature on Oct. 20, 1967, should still be considered perfectly valid, he holds.

Cliff Crook, who carries out his "peaceful pursuit" of the legend from Bigfoot Central in Bothell, Wash., agreed with Fahrenbach about Wallace, while contending that the famous movie footage is faked.

"I don't see this as an arrow into the heart of the Bigfoot search," Crook said. If it discourages belief in the phenomenon, he said, "it might keep some of these trigger-happy weekend warriors out of the woods."

Wallace, Crook said, was long known as a playful con artist among the faithful and sent what seemed obviously faked photos to him even in recent years.

Still, the Wallaces' claim continues an annis horribilis for the man-beast, which also saw the death of one of Bigfoot's most quoted academic supporters --

Washington State University Professor Grover Krantz. His demise in February thinned ranks of the West's Bigfoot-testifying Ph.D.s to, it seems, one.

"It is pretty lonely in that respect," said Jeffrey Meldrum, an anthropology professor at Idaho State University who says science points to a real-life Sasquatch. "There still is such a stigma associated with this subject that young academicians trying to establish their reputation . . . shy away. Privately, those people are talking to me."

Fear not, he said -- Ray L. Wallace rests, but the legend of Bigfoot is alive.

At worst, he said, the week's revelation means "about half a dozen casts that are in my collection that were questionable to begin with may be explained away as having been produced by Wallace's feet.

"I've been out there in the field and come upon footprints in the middle of nowhere. In those situations," he said, "where's Ray Wallace?"